Patriarch Dymytriy (Yarema)

Patriarch Dymytriy (Yarema) (9 December 1915 – 25 February 2000) was the second patriarch of Kiev and all Ukraine, and of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). Patriarch Dymytriy will forever be known as the patriarch who replaced the irreplaceable Patriarch Mstyslav. He was a renaissance man who had studied art and music in his younger years, a leader with a developed political conscious who was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the 1930s.

During World War II he was a prisoner of war in Germany. He was ordained to the diaconate August 3, 1947, and to the priesthood August 10 of that same year. From 1947 – 1989 he was a member of the clergy of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1989 he and the other members of the clergy left the Moscow Patriarchate and declared to be put under the omophor of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Mstyslav (Skrypnyk) who was at that time the head of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in USA and Canada.
After Fr. Volodymyr Yarema, priest of the Lviv Sts. Peter and Paul Church, together with his parish, left the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate on August 19, 1989
By 1990, with the Soviet Union falling apart, the Rev. Yarema initiated and was a participant in the first All-Ukrainian Sobor of the UAOC, held in Kiev in 1990, which elected Metropolitan Mstyslav as the first patriarch of Ukraine. In 1993 he took his monastic vows and then was ordained bishop of Pereyaslovskiy and Sichevskiy. On the II Council of this Church in 1993 he was voted Patriarch of Kyiv and all Rus’-Ukraine. In late 1998 the aging Patriarch Dymytriy, his health weakening and the day-to-day management of the Church and he determined that the future of the Church would be strengthen if it would turn once again to the Ukrainian diaspora, which had maintained the UAOC during nearly 70 years of Communist rule in Ukraine.

The choice Patriarch Dymytriy made in his last will and testament to request that the UAOC hierarchy agree to allow Metropolitan Constantine to guide it - which, if carried out, would effectively unite the two Churches - was a calculated move to save the UAOC from further incursions from the larger Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kiev Patriarchate, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Patriarch Dymytriy (Yarema) was successor to Patriarch Mstyslav (Skrypnyk) from 1993 to 2000 and was succeeded by Metropolitan Mefodiy (Kudryakov) in the Ukranian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.